Europe|Tunisian Captain in Deadly Migrant Shipwreck Jailed for 18 Years

Advertisement

Supported by

Tunisian Captain in Deadly Migrant Shipwreck Jailed for 18 Years

Video

Ali Malek Mohammed was convicted of causing the deaths of about 700 people, after his fishing boat carrying migrants collided with a Portuguese freighter off the coast of Italy in April 2015.CreditCreditTullio M. Puglia/Getty Images

ROME — A Tunisian captain who was piloting a fishing vessel crammed with migrants that collided with another ship, resulting in the deaths of about 700 people traveling to Italy from Libya, was sentenced on Tuesday to 18 years in prison.

The captain, identified as Ali Malek Mohammed, 28, was convicted by a court in Catania, Sicily, of multiple manslaughter, human trafficking and causing the disaster in April 2015, the Mediterranean’s deadliest known shipwreck.

Prosecutors said he had steered the fishing boat into a Portuguese freighter, the King Jacob, off the Italian island of Lampedusa. The King Jacob was sent to the area to help after the Italian authorities received an emergency call, prosecutors said.

The migrant vessel capsized after a violent collision with the Portuguese ship, and only 28 survivors were found after a vast search-and-rescue operation.

The judges also convicted a Syrian man, Bikhit Mahmud, 26, who was serving as first mate, to five years in prison for engaging in illegal immigration.

Both defendants denied being involved in human trafficking, and Mr. Mohammed’s lawyer, Massimo Ferrante, said he would appeal the verdict. “My client says he was a mere passenger,” Mr. Ferrante said in a telephone interview.

That account was disputed by survivors, who attributed the collision to Mr. Mohammed’s ineptitude at steering the vessel.

The central Mediterranean route to Italy has become increasingly deadly — compared with a simpler, shorter route across the sea to Greece from Turkey — with around 4,240 migrants dying in 2016 so far, compared with about 2,860 over the same period last year.

Even before they undertake risky voyages on rickety, overcrowded boats, refugees waiting for passage from Libya face horrific abuse at the hands of Libyan authorities, human traffickers and extremists linked to the Islamic State, the United Nations said on Tuesday in Geneva.

Image

A body was brought ashore after the capsizing of the migrant vessel in April 2015.CreditMatthew Mirabelli/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Armed groups and criminal gangs, taking advantage of the government collapse that followed the downfall of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in 2011, compete in smuggling operations, the world body said in a report compiled by its mission in Libya and its human rights office in Geneva. Migrants are routinely subject to death, torture, rape and sexual abuse, the report said.

But state institutions are also involved. Survivors interviewed by United Nations officials in Italy described being held for weeks, sometimes months, in vastly overcrowded detention centers operated by a Libyan body, the Department for Combating Illegal Migration, or in warehouses and “connection houses” by armed groups or traffickers, who usually seized their documents and belongings, forced them to work and traded them for profit.

Many of those interviewed bore signs of serious injuries, which they attributed to severe beatings, and said they had witnessed deaths from malnutrition and other causes. “They treated us like animals — this is what they call us, ‘animals,’” a 16-year-old Senegalese boy held in a warehouse in southern Libya told his interviewers. “For our captors, it does not matter if we die.”

Women and young girls were particularly vulnerable. A 32-year-old woman from the Comoros said a smuggler had taken her to a Libyan farm, where she was repeatedly raped over a week before her captors eventually allowed her to get on a boat. She could not be sent home, the report said, because if her brothers discovered what had happened to her, they would kill her as a matter of honor.

After the 2015 collision, the bodies of 169 migrants from Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Gambia, Mali and Senegal were retrieved. Hundreds more were trapped in the boat and were recovered only after the vessel was taken to shore in June by the Italian Navy, after achallenging, monthslong operation.

Italy’s prime minister at the time, Matteo Renzi, strongly pushed for the recovery mission — despite the high cost and the complex identification process — as a way to highlight the human aspect of migration in the central Mediterranean.

Officials removed remains from the vessel over the summer, examining them to create a database with information about the victims. Teams of forensic experts worked around the clock in the Sicilian port of Augusta to collect body markings and DNA samples to confirm the identities of the victims and to inform their families.

The grim task of retrieving the corpses fell to firefighters in Sicily, who said they had found the decomposing bodies scattered around the sunken ship, which was under about 1,200 feet of water for over 14 months. Firefighters were called in because they had been trained to work in chemically and biologically dangerous situations.

A spokesman for the service, Luca Cari, said 400 volunteer firefighters, working in 20-minute shifts and protected by sealed chemical suits and oxygen masks, had removed hundreds of corpses, skeletons and other bodily remains from every corner of the fishing boat.

Hundreds of bodies were found in the well of the hull, in the engine room and even on the bridge.

“It was evident from many corpses’ positions that they had struggled to exit when the vessel capsized,” Mr. Cari said. “But the hatchway was closed.”

“It was touching even for professionals like us,” he added. “These men and women traveled the Mediterranean standing five per square meter. It’s inhumane.”